It just never seemed like a good fit to put sand people in the Swiss Alps. Scandinavian sorts tend to be industrious, hardworking, and perhaps more importantly, not prone to homicidal rampages. Culturally, linguistically, religiously. It’s the whole, Go and make disciples of all nations, versus: Kill the infidel! There’s a difference there, I just can’t put my finger on it. Ying vs yang, the whole, “you’ll get to heaven by accepting Jesus”, vs “you will get to heaven by killing all the Christians and Jews.” There just seems like a difference in the great commission of the two.

One wants to make the rivers flow red with the blood of infidels, the other has the Red Cross that helps people of all nations. One side wants to remove the woman’s clitoris and keep her a second class citizen and have regular beatings, the other came up with women’s lib and equal pay statutes. One side moves into an area and it becomes a hotbed of war-torn strife. The other moves into an area and is responsible for every advancement in culture, medicine and science known to man.

In the Sunday USA Today, there was a poignant story from a Kurdish soldier after they had dug up a mass grave ISIS had filled:

What silenced Kurdish soldier Qasam Ismael was a dusty purple blouse worn by a girl perhaps no older than 2 that was clinging to the rocks of a memorial erected inside the grave. “Some of these people are from my village”, Ismael said through an interpreter. “They lined them up on the edge of this wall and beheaded them. Then put them in the grave all together. When I arrived their flesh was all gone. There was a little girl that I recognized by her hair, it was blond.”

In all the print coverage common to central Iowa, the Des Moines Register and the USA Today section within it, you will not see the words Islam or Muslim or jihad. All you will read are the unspecified terms “terror” and “terrorist”. That’s odd, is it just random groups of people that hate us and want to kill us? No! It’s Muslims! How do you suppose we will ever solve a problem if we can’t identify it? If we won’t use honest terminology?

I can full well understand why they hate us, we’ve been propping up dictators they hate and killing their women and children for 40 years. We birthed one of the modern terrorist nations of Iran, by propping up the Shah forever. We gave rise to the Ayatollah Khomeini because of it. Likewise with Saddam Hussein. Likewise with the way the west divided up the region after WWI. Then in just the last 15 years the conservative estimate for the number of noncombatants of theirs that we have killed is half a million. I imagine they are a tad upset.

500,000 of women and children and old people of theirs we have killed. 911 pales in comparison. It is truly obscene what we have done. For some reason their lives just don’t matter to us. Assuming we can’t kill them all, we need to quit killing them at all. We need to find out what it is they want. Paris seems to have caught people’s attention. All the previous headlopping and murders couldn’t do it, maybe this will. If it is possible to live in peace, we need to find out how.